Acrylic has gone live!

Greetings from within Microsoft! I'm excited to let you know that we've just released the beta for Acrylic, an application for professional graphic designers. Please go take a look, download, and send in your feedback! (http://www.microsoft.com/expression)

(To see some art generated with the application, download and install. You can also see some examples by following the link to previous versions.)

I've been working hard trying to get automated testing running for this application and you can expect to see some posts from me regarding the issues I've faced trying to automate an unmanaged application with VS 2005 (Whidbey). I'll also be posting information about the Acrylic application itself. If there are any specific topics feel free to suggest them.

Converting the whole app to managed code isn’t really practical, of course. That being said there are a couple of very interesting things I’d like to point out:

1. Interoping with the app and automating it with managed code is very easy with VS 2005. (I’m planning to throw up a post on this soon, if not tonight.)

2. Just throwing the /clr switch and recompiling the app works flawlessly. Transitioning portions to managed code is certainly something that looks very possible in the future. (And desirable in my personal opinion.)